Historically, tracking products in a warehouse or manufacturing facility has been a labor-intensive process. More recently, barcode scanning systems have been employed to increase the efficiency and accuracy of tracking products. Using a barcode scanning system, items within a warehouse are tagged with barcodes, which are optically readable by handheld barcode scanners. Furthermore, in a product assembly consisting of multiple parts, each part typically needs to be separately tagged and tracked until assembled. In order to take inventory using such a system, personnel are typically required to make rounds through the warehouse and scan each barcode with a barcode scanner. The barcode scanner is typically configured to log the barcode information electronically, thus reducing the time to log each article, and accordingly, reducing the overall time to take inventory. In addition, the barcode scanner often reads and logs the barcode information more accurately than human personnel, which can provide the benefit of increased accuracy of the inventory-taking process. However, due to the labor-intensive nature of the inventory-taking process with barcode scanners, several mistakes can occur.
Furthermore, it is often difficult to read some barcodes due to small pitch, caused by too much data in too small of a space. Some barcodes are too large to fit the available space on certain products. Mistakes can be caused by skipping an entry and cascading the error through additional fields or records, scanning the wrong label, or scanning the correct label at the wrong time. There also exists complicated data validation schemes due to non-standardized barcode labels.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.